When it comes to carrying out the death penalty, the United States is in the Top Ten. We're nothing compared China, which does away with 1,000 or so each year. Or with Iran, which carries out about half that number of executions. The figure for Vietnam is a bit murky, but it may be four times higher than the US number (24 last year), even though they have roughly one quarter of our population.
Overall, our affecion for the death penalty puts us in some pretty bad company - countries in the Mideast, Asia, and Africa where you wouldn't want to live. No fellow G8 countries, no members of NATO. (If you're wondering about Russia, they've had a moratorium on the death penalty for neary 30 years. This is something of a wink-wink nudge-nudge deal, as Putin's political enemies regularly meet with an untimely death, so they do have a death penalty of sorts.)
Vietnam is an interesting case.
They're not especially transparent about how many executions they carry out each year, but unlike the US, you can be given a death sentence for fraud. As in:
A court in Vietnam handed the death sentence [in early April] to real estate tycoon Truong My Lan for her role in a 304 trillion dong (€11.6 billion [$12.4B]) financial fraud, the country’s biggest on record, state media said.
...She was found guilty, with her accomplices, of siphoning off more than 304 trillion dong from Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank (SCB), which she effectively controlled through dozens of proxies, despite rules strictly limiting large shareholding in lenders, according to investigators. (Source: Irish Times)
Her 2022 arrest triggered a run on SCB.
There were 84 defendants convicted in this scheme who:
...received sentences ranging from probation for three years to life imprisonment. Among them are Lan’s husband, Eric Chu, a businessman from Hong Kong, who was sentenced to nine years in jail, and her niece, who was sentenced to 17 years.
In addition to receiving a death sentence, Lan was given 20-year sentences "for bribery and violating lending regulations." Vietnam don't play.
She was also hit with a small financial penalty. Roughly $27M, which is a pretty small potato when compared to the $12.4B pile o' fraud.
She will be appealing her sentence.
Lan reached tycoon status from pretty humble beginnings. She began her business life as a cosmetics trader at the main market in Ho Chi Minh City. (What would Ho have to say about this?)
While I like to see a poor girl make it big, it's too bad she had to reach the heights through fraud.
Corruption is more or less the norm in Vietnam, but the country recently decided to crack down through an anti-corruption initiative dubbed Blazing Furnace. (Blazing Furnace? Vietnam don't play.)
The magnitude of the fraud - $12.4B - is a lot, but chump change when compared to Bernie Madoff's $64B Ponzi embezzlement (closer to $93B in today's dollars). The Vietnam amount is more in line with Sam Bankman-Fried's grab of $8-$10B. But compared to Vietnam's GDP:
The total takings, according to the charges on which she was convicted, were equivalent to more than 3 percent of the country’s gross domestic product as of 2022. (Source: Washington Post)
Put it into this perspective: US GDP in 2022 was $25.44T. Three percent of that is nearly $800B. So, yikes!
But you don't have to be a major thief to qualify for the death penalty:
Embezzlement of as little as 500 million Vietnamese dong — $20,000 — of government funds qualifies for such punishment, according to the group.
I'm not an advocate of the death penalty. It's been misused and abused, and falls disproportionately on the poor and people of color. I'd like to see it outlawed in the US. Or deployed with colossal rarity, and only for the most spectacularly heinous of crimes where there's not one scintilla of doubt who done it. Maybe.
But as a thought experiment: wonder whether it would have any deterrent effect if we had the death penalty for fraud.
Meanwhile, it's probably going to harsh the mellow of anyone in Vietnam contemplating fraud.
No comments:
Post a Comment